Sophia And Beatrice
by Tiamat's Child
Summary: Sophia and Beatrice have been lonely, but this is changing. The Amelia Peabody Series, ff
1. Turkish Coffee

Turkish Coffee

Tiamat's Child

Sophia does not recall how it started. She is not even sure anymore what it is, if her and Dr. Ferguson's ritual of taking a late evening tea together (though tea is not quite the right word, as coffee is more often served, meant to ward off exhaustion on long shifts) is merely that, or if it is what her imagination whispers it might be, something fuller and richer and a little more dangerous.

She hopes it is the second. She has never had that, never had wordless songs and dusky evenings. She gave up much in exchange for this, for blood and torn flesh to mend. She has been alone for a thick span of dusty time, and now she finds that she longs someone to touch her out of love and want, rather than the desperate need of a night terror.

But even if it is not what she hopes for, after all, there is enough in those moments to sustain her. The curl of hands around hot liquid, voices low in talk of sutures and thread, just the right amount of light to encircle the two of them and let them be apart from the world for an instant, these things are enough.

Tonight they talk and smile, and Sophia feels warm and bright and full. But it can't last long, for there are women to be tended and stiched up and made as comfortble as possible. So Sophia stands up and folds her napkin. "Time for my rounds. God go with you, Dr. Ferguson." 

"Inshallah," the other woman says, and smiles a trifle shyly. "Call me Beatrice, please, Dr. Sophia."

Sophia smiles back, trying to hide her sudden giddiness. "Just Sophia, please."

And Beatrice's eyes widen and gleam brightly, making her sturdy, firm face far more lovely than Sophia can remember it ever being.

Sophia goes about her rounds, tending and mending, and doing her best to help, if only just a little. And, tonight, all the pain and hate and degradation cannot tear her heart inside out. She has a something that maybe will be more.


	2. Satisfy a Woman

Author: Tiamat's Child Title: Satisfy a Woman Rating: PG-13  
  
Fandom: The Amelia Peabody novels Pairing: Dr. Sophia/Dr. Beatrice Ferguson Summary: Beatrice needs, and wants, and loves. Disclaimers: Sophia and Beatrice belong to Elizabeth Peters, not me, but as she's not really doing anything with them at present I'm sure she won't mind if I let them take a little comfort in each other. Notes: Written in thirty minutes for the poetry challenge at Contralemontre. Sophia and Beatrice are extremely minor characters who run a woman's hospital in the red light district of early 20th century Cairo.  
  
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Manifesto: Mad Farmer's Liberation Front Wendell Berry  
  
Satisfy a Woman  
  
Beatrice knows it isn't selfish. There's nothing selfish about this, about catching Sophia for a quick moment before a surgery, pressing lips together in a swift wish for care and good fortune. She knows it isn't selfish to want what every human needs. There's nothing selfish there.  
  
But sometimes it hurts, to know that she has what so few of her patients can even hope of finding. Those times she has to turn away, and cannot allow herself to sleep curled close in the curve of Sophia's body. She stays a step back, unable to touch, because she knows that what she has is something that the women she cares for cannot even seek, because they are bound as slaves to the thoughtless hunger of men.  
  
Until Sophia reaches out, and buries herself against Beatrice, both of their bodies trembling. Until the blood of a hemorrhage spills across their hands together, and they work and work and work until they can barely breathe, and still the girl dies, trying to bear a baby she could not have fed. Until Beatrice loses herself in the constant wash of pain around her, and has to cling to Sophia to find something vaguely like solid ground again.  
  
And then they fall together, blood smearing, though they pay it no mind, for there's always blood, always, and they spend far too much time cleaning themselves of it to be afraid of it anymore, once the bleeding has stopped. And they are needy, and desperate, and hurting, but still there is nothing that they can speak that does not carry love, because they love each other with the endless love of women who have faced the long hours before dawn side by side. Both of them need to be loved so badly. Both of them need to love someone who won't die.  
  
It is beautiful, the silence, and whispers, and fear chilled hands on cold skin. Something for themselves, hidden from the rest of the world. And here, if Beatrice forgets to breathe, there is Sophia to startle breath back into her.  
  
Beatrice knows she doesn't need any more than this. She's satisfied to be in this place the two of them have made for themselves. This is her haven. 


	3. Upon the City Walls

Title: Upon the City Walls Author: Tiamat's Child Rating: PG-13  
  
Fandom: The Amelia Peabody novels Pairing: Dr. Sophia/Dr. Beatrice Ferguson Summary: Silence poisons the soul. Disclaimers: Sophia and Beatrice belong to Elizabeth Peters, not me, but as she's not really doing anything with them at present I'm sure she won't mind if I let them take a little comfort in each other.  
  
Upon the City Walls  
  
Silence poisons women. All the things that a woman sees, when held within, hidden and unspoken, become as destructive as cyanide. Silence is the way to survive, the manner in which a woman avoids injury massive enough to kill her. Silence is a woman's strength and refuge, but it is also her destruction.  
  
Sophia knows this. She has watched her mother and aunts' mouths wither under the heat of their own quiet. They would not speak to each other, they could not speak to their husbands, and they did not speak to her, and so their words dried up and disappeared, like an oasis, life giving and welcoming one year, dead the next. Sophia resolved that the same thing would not happen to her.  
  
Yet, when she left home and came to the city for her schooling she found that there was no one she could speak to. She was alone, for there was no one who would stop to listen. So, though she would have been willing to talk to just about anyone, she stayed silent.  
  
Those days passed slowly. She stood and no one saw her, for she was only a woman, and no one they knew. She spoke and no one heard, for she was only a woman, and all they knew of her was that she was were they knew she should not be. A strange, thick isolation settled itself around her. When she was not being actively opposed she did not seem to exist. Like a dragon on the city walls in an old tale, she was invisible because she was not supposed to exist. People looked at her, but their gaze glided over, and no one saw.  
  
At times she felt as if the desert wind had wrapped itself about her and kept all who surrounded her at bay. She was safe, for there was no one who sought her out, no one who could get near enough to truly hurt her, but she was also alone, and slowly suffocating under the weight of unsaid words. She was dying of silence as surely as her mother had.  
  
Sophia watched parts of her that she had always hoped to share someday with a lover dry up and crumble away. She felt her heart go numb at the edges, the pieces of it that could have learned to be loved disappearing in the endless, barren quiet. All she was left with was work, and it was work that she wanted, work that she needed, work that others had to have to live, and it was good, but it was not quite enough. She changed, the pose and vision of a strong, brilliant doctor who could make everything all right sliding down to smooth over the jagged edges of a woman whose heart broke with each new patient, and who could never quite tell where she was.  
  
The pain of her patients drew her down, taking her places where there was no up or down or right or left and the best anyone could do was move and hope they were headed toward the surface. She lost herself in the need to heal, to help, to do for her fellow women everything she possibly could. She shook at night, and wanted more than anything to tell someone of how afraid and lonely and angry she was, but there was no one there to tell, because she was a dragon on the city walls, and as such she was alone.  
  
And then Beatrice came, and Sophia found herself opening again, because she wasn't alone anymore. There was someone who would listen. Sophia found that the words tumbled out, still there after all. She found that the pieces of herself she had thought were gone forever had really only been dormant, and that they came back to life with the proper watering. Sophia fell in love, and Beatrice, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, fell in love just as surely.  
  
So now there are words. Sophia and Beatrice talk together often, curling together on the floor with cups of coffee and things that neither of them have ever had a chance to say. Old stories find an airing between them, full of things they wish they could have said years ago, comments and retorts that had to be held back and buried. Beatrice cannot quite comprehend the nature of Sophia's childhood and culture, but that's all right, as Sophia can't quite make sense of the stories Beatrice tells her, either. They try, and both love to hear the tales told.  
  
Sophia has never had someone to talk about the day, and what went wrong, and what surgery could go better next time if they do it differently. But that wonderful, indulgent thing is hers now, and she does not know how she ever managed without it. She feels more alive than she ever has. Even when she's hurting and afraid it seems easier to bear, because she has Beatrice, and she knows that she will be able to talk, when there is time.  
  
Even when she makes no sound at all, Sophia isn't silent anymore. 


	4. In Circles

Title: In Circles Author: Tiamat's Child Rating: PG  
  
Fandom: The Amelia Peabody novels Pairing: Dr. Sophia/Dr. Beatrice Ferguson Summary: There's privacy, and there's intimacy, and Sophia's really quite good at holding them in tension. Disclaimers: Sophia and Beatrice belong to Elizabeth Peters, not me, but as she's not really doing anything with them at present I'm sure she won't mind if I let them take a little comfort in each other. Notes: A pentadrabble written in thirty minutes for the Hospital challenge at Contralemontre. Sophia and Beatrice are extremely minor characters who run a woman's hospital in the red light district of early 20th century Cairo.  
  
In Circles  
  
Sophia finds more and more that her world consists of circles, nestled inside each other like the lacquer boxes Beatrice loves so much. There are big circles, and little circles, and circles that fit two together. Sophia has begun to track them, under all the rest of the rapidly running thoughts that fill her mind at any given moment.  
  
Her middle circle is the hospital. It's the thin box slipped in with an even number of boxes on each side, a smoothly equal expanse of the personal and the impersonal. From the hospital the circles go in, and the circles go out.  
  
When they go out they expand, and get thinner and larger, having to contain more and more space with just the same amount of material. It might be dangerous to let them encompass too much. She tries to keep them close. The one closest to the hospital contains Cairo, and the one next to that Egypt, and then there's one that holds England, and after that they spiral out in ways she's sure they didn't before Beatrice.  
  
The ones that circle in from the hospital are different. Sturdier and smaller and more important than the ones that circle out and out and out. One is the room that she shares with Beatrice. One is their bed. One is the two of them, curled close together, almost like kittens at peace. From there, the pair they make together, the boxes curl at the same level, but in different circles. Sophia's settle into her flesh and her mind and her memories and all the things that are solely her and can never be part of Sophia and Beatrice, at least not wholly. Beatrice's do the same, and Sophia does not really know what they are.  
  
This is as it should be. To be lovers, you must be people. To be people you must have selves of your own. Sophia has always known this.  
  
Beatrice is a wonderful person. Brisk and blunt and a trifle bad tempered, with no patience for men at all. Sophia doesn't much trust men, she's seen too much of what their tempers and lusts can do to have too high an opinion of them, but she doesn't think they're a complete waste of space the way Beatrice does.  
  
Somehow, Beatrice makes the sentiment sound charming. That's how Sophia knows that they really are lovers, and not merely convenient companions. They find each other's eccentricities far too delightful and understandable to be anything other than in love.  
  
Sophia is glad of it. It's nice to have a circle nestled so close to the private ones that make you up. Before Beatrice came, no other people were close enough to really be a part of her circles. Girls came and went through the hospital, staying long enough to take a chunk of Sophia's soul with them, but no one knew her.  
  
Beatrice knows her. Beatrice loves. She loves Beatrice.  
  
They share as many circles as two people can. 


End file.
